An appendix may be referred to as a collection of useful information that is supplemental to the information that is contained in the main body of a document. The appendix may contain a table, a list, calculations, data, background information, or other types of information that may be relevant to the main document content. The information present in an appendix may support the content in the main document by enabling the reader to better understand and appreciate the topics that are contained in the. The appendix of the document is usually present at the end of the document may comprise sections, although these sections are not usually not referred to explicitly within the document, the sections of the appendix may be presented as an addendum or supplement to the main document.
Documents may be published in various forms and in various formats such as HTML, PDF and TEXT. In current practice, generally the document appendix may be manually added by researching supplemental information that the author evaluates as being potentially useful for the reader. A variety of available sources may be considered for inclusion in the appendix, depending upon the topic of the main document. For example, a financial review document about a company could include additional tabular data about the financial figures and stock performance at the end of the review. On the other hand, a scientific review of a methodology related to an experiment may contain appendix sections detailing important concepts referred to in the document.
However, the utility of the appendix may depend on several factors, such as the experience level or talent of the researcher evaluating the information for the appendix. Additionally, manually creating the appendix may consume scarce resources, such as the amount of time available to spend on the project, to fetch the information from a variety sources, such as a web page or a corpus of documents, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Another potential challenge to available time and resources may include the reiterative effort to edit and refine the appendix and ensure that vital information is not omitted.